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The Tombeaux des princes is a cycle of paintings and engravings produced from the 1720s to the 1740s under the direction of Owen McSwiny. After having been a theatrical impresario in London he relocated to Venice, where he devised a series of twenty-four paintings, most of them over seven feet high, and hired artists from Venice and Bologna to carry them out. Twenty seem of them seem to have been completed. Each focuses on an imaginary tomb for a prominent English political, military, or intellectual figure of recent decades. Most were Whigs or held Whig views and were connected in some way with the Glorious Revolution.

After selling eleven of the paintings to his principal patron, Charles Lennox, the 2nd Duke of Richmond, and the remaining ones probably to Sir William Morice of Werrington, McSwiny planned a series of engravings reproducing them. He described his intentions and procedure in a prospectus soliciting subscriptions for the prints, To the Ladies and Gentlemen of Taste in Great-Britain and Ireland, probably published around 1735. He had drawings of the paintings made by Domenico Maria Fratta, an artist from Bologna, and commissioned Parisian printmakers to copy these for the engravings. Nine reproductive engravings were completed, together with eleven introductory pages. Most of the introductory pages were designed and drawn by François Boucher.

Each complete set of engravings is introduced by a page with the title: Tombeaux des princes grands capitaines et autres hommes illustres, qui ont fleuri dans la Grand-Bretagne vers la fin du XVII et le commencement du XVIII siècle (Tombs of the Princes, Great Captains and Other Illustrious Men who were Prominent in Great Britain towards the End of the Seventeenth Century and the Beginning of the Eighteenth). Some sets also include five pages of text related to two of the honorees, Isaac Newton and the Duke of Dorset.

The Paintings
As he stated in his prospectus, McSwiny had each painting completed by more than one artist.